


A Hell of a Gesture

by scioscribe



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Morality, First Time Blow Jobs, Ghost Sex, Ghosts, M/M, Murder, Period-Typical Racism, Revenge, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-02 23:21:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13328577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: All they had given or gotten each other was spilled blood.





	A Hell of a Gesture

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PositivelyVexed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/gifts).



> Your prompts were excellent and I hope this dark, weird chocolate is to your liking.

First sight Chris saw when he woke was the body on the bed next to him.  It took him a long and fuzzed-up second to even recognize it as Major Warren—somehow he couldn’t wrap his mind around the major getting made into a corpse, not if he had lived himself.  He’d thought they were both dying.  For him to have pulled ahead and left the major to die alone—well, it didn’t seem in the spirit of things.  Sweet fuck, his leg hurt.  At least with the hot claws of that bullet wound digging into him he could suss out why the hell he was knocked back by the death of Major Marquis fucking Warren.

Though they could have not left his dead body in the bed right there next to him.  They hadn’t even laid the sheet up over his head.

Somebody gave him a drink of water.  Once his lips were wet, he said, “It ain’t right, leaving him here.”  He wiped his mouth off and tried to make his eyes focus.  His doctor was a skinny, grizzled old fella with a beard down to his belt-buckle; spectacles nearly as thick as a man’s wrist.  “He ought to be buried.”

“You’re forgetting the snow,” the old man said.  “And you’re not thinking about the fact that I’m seventy-three fucking years old and if I tried to drag his ass out to even freeze up nice and stiff to dig a hole for later, my heart would give out and then where would you be?”

“In bed without a corpse, that’s where I’d be.”

“You’re the most ungrateful son-of-a-bitch ever got his leg stitched up, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Hey.”  He tried to push himself up and stopped when the pain got too bad.  “Never mind me being thankful—there’s a wallet in the pocket of that gray coat over there with pretty close to five hundred dollars in it.  That’s all yours, friend, for helping me, saving my life and all, maybe one or two other things.”

The old man gave him a hard look, like he resented even being asked to pick his lazy ass up out of the chair.  “That’s a Confederate coat.  It Confederate money?”

“Real money,” Chris said.  His daddy would have threatened to cut his tongue out for that and called it blasphemy, but that didn’t change the fact that you couldn’t do much with Confederate bills anymore except wipe your ass with them, and a man had to be practical, didn’t he?  “My stake for coming west.  I’m the new sheriff of Red Rock.”

“You don’t look like any sheriff.”

“How’s somebody gonna look like a sheriff or not look like a sheriff?”

“And another thing,” the old man said, finally hauling himself up.  “That’s a general’s coat and you ain’t no general, you’re too young for that.”

“It’s my wallet but it ain’t my coat, or did you miss the fact that it’s fucking freezing in here?”

“And I’m just supposed to take your word for it that it’s your money?”

“Dammit, what would it even matter?  You see anybody in here gonna bitch about his cash getting lifted?”  Quarrelsome old bastard.  It irked Chris all the more because it _was_ his fucking money, too.  People out here didn’t take his word for _shit_.

Getting those old rheumatic hands of his on all those greenbacks did sweeten the fella up some.  He ended up agreeing to do what Chris asked, which for the moment was just to bring over the bloodied, wadded-up Lincoln letter.  He smoothed it out and folded it neatly.  Nowhere good to put it right then and there, especially with his pants cut off and his leg aching so much he couldn’t even contemplate trying to get another pair on, so he just buttoned it into his shirt, his fingers shaking a little.  Then he dictated a letter to Red Rock and outlined some funeral plans.  He had done the latter one or twice before.  War tended to give a man experience in that kind of thing, but then, there was nothing war _didn’t_ tend to give a man experience in, one way or the other.

He supposed he and the major had been through their own little war right here in Minnie’s.

“Awful fancy arrangements for a man who talks the way you do to make for somebody as black as he is.”

“Don’t you know?” Chris said.  All he wanted to do was close his eyes.  “This right here is the famous Major Marquis Warren.  He was practically friends with Abraham Lincoln himself.”

“And _that_ endeared you to him?”  He sounded skeptical.

“I’m just _saying_ , it goes to show the kind of _person_ he was.  His stature and all.”

The old man shrugged.  “It’s your money.”

Chris turned his head to look at the major again.  Death had taken some of the color out of him, made him a little paler.  He wouldn’t have liked that at all, no, sir.  And he’d have liked it even less that Chris had noticed it, but he might have seen in Chris’s face that it wasn’t like he was thinking it was a good thing.  He didn’t know how he felt about it.  He’d seen messier dead folks, and with the major’s shot-up balls covered up a little, he didn’t look so bad, except for looking paler, except for looking dead, and somehow that was bad enough.

The Lincoln letter crackled against his chest as he tried to roll over and gave up on it, cussing.  He just lay there, breathing in and out, keeping his eyes closed so he wouldn’t have to spend any more time thinking about what he saw with them.

He stayed like that for a while until he must have drifted off into some kind of bleary sleep, because the next time he saw Major Warren, the major was standing at the foot of the bed and looking down at him with an expression on his face Chris couldn’t recognize.  It was funny how he could see the major so clearly through the firelight-streaked darkness when the old man snoozing on Sweet Dave’s bloodied-up chair was nothing more than a snoring lump.  He’d have thought the major would be the one he’d be _least_ likely to see in a dark room, wouldn’t that make sense?  But it seemed right all the same that he should be so lighthouse-clear.

“I dreamed you were dead and gone,” Chris said sleepily.

“Yeah,” Major Warren said, “dead and gone,” but he sounded hearty, which was how Chris knew he was lying.  He had enough experience of the man by now to know Major Warren only bothered cluing white folks into what he was feeling when he wasn’t feeling it at all.

Well, Chris wasn’t about to believe it, and he wanted Major Warren to know that.  “Hell if I can see what you’ve got to fib about now.”

Now the major was giving him a look like he was a shotgun already to be broken down and oiled, like he was thinking, _Here’s something useful_.  It brought about a kind of cramp in Chris’s chest.  “Call it a half-fib.”

“Not gone,” Chris said, because he had proof enough of that looking right back at him, “but dead.”  He looked over and got grim confirmation of that.  “Hell, you are one of the deadest sons-of-bitches I ever seen.  Like a doll short its stuffing.”

“Yeah, you know why?”

“Because you got your balls blown off’s why.”

“No, because I got my balls blown off’s why I’m taking being dead as well as I am, but you and me, Chris Mannix, we were neck and neck racing our way to the River Styx when grandpappy over there came along.”  He jerked his head in the direction of the old man, who was snoozing in the armchair that was now almost quilted with patches of dried blood.  “You were out cold, but I wasn’t.  Now, I’ll give you that you seemed fixable and I didn’t, but even after he took that needle and thread to you, you think he fooled around with me?  Even got me a shot of whiskey for the pain?”

The answer to that much was clear.  Chris bet Major Warren wouldn’t have begged any for it, either.  No wonder the old man was afraid to go moving the major’s body around: if ever there was a ghost that was looking to bite, it was his.

Of course, he could say that Major Marquis Warren had every reason to fuck around from the afterlife trying to cause havoc for him, he could say that and maybe even be right about it and then he could go so far as to say that the rattly old sawbones had saved _his_ life, anyway, and what did he care about whether or not the fellow had gotten around to bestirring himself over the major’s?  Death was due to him anyway and good fucking riddance.  And then he could go still further and say that maybe he would have cared if he’d believed it, but he didn’t; could say why would he go believing some boy-raping, boy-killing son-of-a-bitch who blamed white folks for all his trouble?  Wasn’t Major Warren working himself up to be the bastard who cried cracker?

He didn’t say any of that, though.  For the same reason, he guessed, that he’d admitted Confederate money wasn’t real money: all matters of home and country aside, true was true, and a man shouldn’t bullshit _himself_ about it, even if he had to talk a good line to the rest of the world.

Besides, the major had never lied to him in _particular_ , only in a general sort of way.

_That you know of._

“So you passed on,” Chris said.  Even to his own ears, that sounded flat and metallic, bloody-coppery like a penny.

Major Warren gave him a smile that was even worse than the look he’d given him when he was thinking Chris could come in handy.  “So I passed on.”

“Well,” Chris said, wondering how the hell he’d gotten himself into the fix of taking up with a black ghost who’d nearly gotten him killed over a living white man who’d kept him breathing, “that ain’t right.  Is it.”

“You know it ain’t,” Warren said, and it was the kind of thing Chris had heard him say a few times by then, always with that bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed sound to it, but now he just sounded like he meant it, like he was saying he knew that Chris really did know it.

Chris sighed and hobbled up, wincing as he put weight on his leg.  The whiskey had numbed it a little, at least.  It didn’t seem right to do this, but it didn’t seem right _or_ loyal to not do it, so here he was doing it—having always cared more about loyal than right anyhow—but he had some particulars he wanted clear first.  “Alive or not, major, I am busted up to hell and I ain’t gonna string anybody up from any kind of rafter, not without help.  You think I’m gonna try, you got your brains shot out along with your balls.”

“My balls are back,” Major Warren said calmly, “and nothing ever happened to my brain.  Unlike yours, I’m assuming.  No, the noose was symbolic, hillbilly, and the symbol’s fucking changed.”

“You gonna tell me what it is now, then?  Or do I have to find a spiritualist so you can rap it all out with your knuckles?”

“Oh, I doubt you’d have the patience for all that.  And yeah, I’m gonna tell you.  You’ve got a bullet left in that gun, bullet you were going to put right between Daisy’s eyes.  I got a better use for it.  You know how long it takes a man to die once he’s been gutshot?”

“I’d tell you I didn’t, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“No, I would not.”  His hand against Chris’s chin was sudden and shockingly solid, though cold, and his eyes had no forgiveness in them: not just not for Chris, not for anything or anybody at all.  He shivered and Major Warren laughed at him, not in the kind of way anybody should like to be laughed at, and he said, “You scared of ghosts, Chris Mannix?”

“I just didn’t think you’d be able to touch me.  If you can do that, why don’t you kill him yourself?”

Major Warren let go of him.  “Waiting for you to wake up, I’ve been all over this place, all through everything.  Most all of it I can’t move so much as an inch.  You, on the other hand—”  Another one of those laughs, another one of those looks.

“Sure,” Chris said, deliberately misunderstanding him.  “I can move whatever you want.”  He gave him a shit-eating smile.  “Major, I always do like to help out.  Where’d we leave that pistol?”

“Never mind the pistol,” Major Warren said.  “As much as I’d like to watch that bastard to die slower than molasses, let’s say I’m doing you a favor, sparing you being cooped up through another storm with a man howling with pain.  No bullet in the belly.”

“So a bullet in the head?”

“No bullet at all.  Hell, save it, you’ve only got the one, if I counted right.  Reach over there to my body and draw out that knife I got.”

“I got my own knife.”

“And if I wanted you to use your own knife, I’d tell you to use it.”

He didn’t know what had worked on him to make him comply with everything like this—not like he was some wind-up toy, exactly, but like he was in some kind of fucked-up courtship and trying to impress a girl he knew to be demanding.  Or like he was trying to please his—well, not like that.  Either way, he had no call to act like it with Major Warren of all people, but here he was, leaning over and getting the knife, not liking having to briefly lay the flat of his hand against that cordwood-stiff body to do it.  He came up with it and Major Warren held out his own ghostly version.  Chris could hear the two blades clink together.

“That just makes me dizzy,” he said.  “Try to hand it to me, will you?”

The major hesitated but then did, flipping it over so Chris could take it by the hilt.  He was able to hold onto it so long as some part of it was touching the major’s own hand, then the second he lifted it all the way up, his fingers just seemed to slip off it like it’d turned to air.

“I guess it’s this one or nothing,” Chris said, pressing his thumb against the edge until a thin line of blood sprang up.  “Doesn’t surprise me at all you keep this nice and sharp.  What do you want me to do with it?”

“Whatever strikes your fancy, white boy.”

“I don’t think you much like my fancies, black major.”

“There’s not much about you I do like,” Major Warren agreed with more equanimity than Chris thought was polite.  He didn’t go on to say anything else.

For some reason it gave him a funny feeling again, like the knives clicking together: something happening that wasn’t supposed to be happening.  He hitched up his chin, still feeling the chill of the major’s touch on it, and went over to the old man who had saved his life and taken his dictation; the man who had neat little stitches and a name Chris didn’t know.  But he didn’t think about it that way, at least not for more than a moment.  It didn’t really matter if the bastard had let Major Warren bleed to death there in that bed out of to-hell-with-that-nigger sentiment or just out of sheer incompetence, but his instinct said it was the former, which meant that once upon a not-so-long-ago time, he and the old man could have gotten along like gunpowder and fire.  Somebody sensible enough to want real US money and hard enough to let a black man die without so much as a sip of whiskey?  Now that was a combination.  Though now that Chris thought about it, he maybe would have gone so far as to pour the whiskey even then, even for Major Warren.  There was what was good and due to the protection of your people and then there was just being an asshole.

But he wouldn’t have looked much askance at somebody not doing the same, and now—

Now he just thought about the way Major Warren had thanked him for saying something nice about the Lincoln letter—not something nice about racial harmony or reconciliation, that bullshit, but about the _delivery_ of the bullshit, the skill of it all.  He’d noticed it and the major had liked him noticing and thanked him for it.

So he didn’t do anything that’d keep him up for hours with screaming, but he did do some things.  He was only about half as good with a knife as he was with a rope or a gun, but even an ordinary craftsman could sometimes put together a work of art.  That was how he tried to think of it.  He didn’t feel peaceful about it afterward, the way he’d felt with Daisy, because this didn’t count as any fucking victory, because he was alone, because this was something no man who’d call himself a sheriff ought to be doing.  He didn’t even feel finished.  He stopped only when he dropped the knife because his hand had gotten all slippery.

“There,” he said.  “You’re satisfied now, aren’t you?  You got what you were after?  Move on.”

But he had known from the start, hadn’t he, that neither one of them was much for believing in moving on?

The major didn’t beat a path to either heaven or hell.  He just took his own ghost-knife out of its ghost-sheath.  The blood Chris had put on it fell drop by the drop onto the floor.

“You and me, huh,” Chris said.  “That’s something.”

“It is,” Major Warren said.

“Well?”  He didn’t know what he was demanding, didn’t know why he thought he had the right to make a demand at all.  He knew why he _should_ have thought he did, but that _wasn’t_ why.  Wasn’t even close.

The blood was hot in his face and then Major Warren’s hand was cold against him, down at the fly of his trousers.  Chris was instantly, shamefully hard; he couldn’t even look at himself.  He brought one bloody hand up and messed up Major Warren’s nice blue coat with it and that, at least, made him smile.  The major saw that in his eyes and pushed him up against the wall hard enough that Chris knocked his head there.  Another jar of candy fell to the floor and broke.  Chris’s dick was out of his pants now and Major Warren was stroking him with one rough, chilled hand, but only for about half a minute.  Then he pushed Chris down to his knees, which made Chris yelp at the pain, his leg jarring like it did against the floor.  If the major looked concerned about that, Chris missed it.

He knew what he was being asked to do.  Say what you would about Major Marquis Warren, but he wasn’t a man who gave a body unclear expectations.

Chris had never done it before, but he wasn’t about to say so, until he did.

“That’s fine,” Major Warren said.  “The Smithers boy hadn’t either.”

Chris scowled, though he couldn’t have said whether he was doing it because he figured the major was lying or because he just didn’t like the thought of it one way or the other.  “I mean I’m not—”  But it didn’t matter much what he was like.  He already wasn’t who he’d been when he’d gotten in the fucking stagecoach.  And he wanted this.

He got started.  He was pissed off about being clumsy but he couldn’t do anything about it: he was too tired and too torn-up inside to make any kind of pass at refinement.  And the major was _cold_ , even down there, though it helped that he wasn’t the clammy bloodless kind of cold his body must have been by then; more like winter-cold.  But he tasted good—just having him there was good, better than good.  Fucking amazing.  He thought traitorous thoughts about having wanted this all along, all his life maybe.  All that wasted time during the war when he could have been kneeling down for Marquis Warren the whole damn while.  He didn’t know what the hell had gotten into him, and then he thought, real matter-of-fact, _Cock, Major Warren’s cock_ , and he made a whimpery little noise even a dog would have been ashamed of.

Major Warren didn’t laugh at him.  That was something.  He just came instead, leaving Chris sputtering and then swallowing, his mind all mixed up about what had happened.  That bittersweet-salty taste on his tongue and his lips.  He didn’t know what to think, but luckily for him, the major didn’t care much what he thought, he just hoisted Chris up—his leg wresting another stifled sound from him—and closed one of those cold hands around Chris’s cock.

“You’re burning up, hillbilly,” Major Warren said.  “I always did like a fire.”

“I ain’t hot, you’re cold.”

“So this don’t feel good, then, and I should stop.”

“I ain’t complaining,” Chris said quickly.  Maybe a little desperately.  “I just never fucked a ghost before, you know?”

“You ain’t fucking a ghost now,” Major Warren said, but his hand kept moving tight and fast, his grip as sure and good as anything Chris had ever felt.  He put his mouth next to Chris’s ear.  His breath was the only thing about him that wasn’t cold.  “I were fucking you, Chris Mannix, I’d make damn sure you knew it and couldn’t ever mistake it for anything else.”

He didn’t know when he’d last come so hard, if he’d ever done at all.  His ears were ringing and his good leg was as unsteady beneath him as his bad one.  He’d have fallen into bed if Major Warren’s body wasn’t still there, so as it was, he laid down by hearth under a heap of blankets, borrowing a tactic from poor OB.  With the fire all up against him like that, he couldn’t feel one way or the other whether there was a cold snap right there in the room with him.

Anyway, he thought, when he opened his eyes again, when he woke in the morning, Major Warren would be gone to wherever the dead went, and Chris could start convincing himself he’d had one hell of a strange dream.  Start convincing himself that the man he’d sliced up had gotten that way in all the fracas, for that matter.  Then just wait out what was left of the storm.

But when the morning came, the storm was still roaring and Major Warren was still there, sitting in an armchair and examining his pistol like there was anybody it could shoot.

Chris groaned, stretched, and dug his fingers into the stiff muscle of his leg.  He still felt all woozy.  “I don’t suppose you got body enough that you could’ve made breakfast.”

Major Warren gave him a look that clearly said that even if he could have, he wouldn’t have, or he would have made it just for himself and not allowed Chris so much as a crumb of his toast.  Clearly he wasn't inclined to give such stupidity an answer.  Instead, he said, "Still a hell of a blizzard we've got going on out there."

"That it is."

"Third day of it, because I think you slept all through yesterday.  Your yesterday's two days ago."

Chris couldn't think of anything to say to that.  He wasn't going to apologize for being sick as a dog.  He levered himself up and examined the provisions, trying to ignore the rotten-tooth pain that was spreading through him.  He probably couldn't trust the coffeepot at all, come to think of it, which meant he'd have to do without.  He didn't know what amount of scrubbing would make him feel confident he could brew in it and not be spitting blood up everywhere within ten or fifteen minutes.  "When do you suppose it'll stop?"

"I'm no weathervane."

"Major, being dead has gone and put you in a _mood_ , and--"  He hissed in a breath.  Jarred his bad leg against the edge of the table like an idiot because he couldn't feel it the way he ought to.  He hoped to hell this didn't all end up with him getting it cut off.  He didn't finish the sentence and, bafflingly, Major Warren didn't get onto him about it.  He just watched Chris fry up some eggs like it was downright fascinating.  Maybe he was getting fed off the scent of them somehow.

Chris shoveled food in his mouth and kept his aching leg stretched out with no pressure on it.  He started feeling a little more like a man.  He said, "How come Daisy and them aren't hanging around, you think?  Hey, _hanging_ around, you like that?  That's a pretty good joke."

"I don't know," Major Warren said.  "Why she ain't here, I mean, not that I don't know if you're joke's funny or not.  I come down hard on one side of that particular issue.  Daisy being dead is pretty fucking hilarious, but the joke was only so-so."  He kept popping the cylinder in and out of his pistol, restless as a cat climbing up a table.  It occurred to Chris, unwelcome-like, that Major Warren didn't much like being only a ghost.  That probably didn't qualify as an epiphany, but he felt it with a cold, forceful intensity, not much different from Major Warren's cock going into his mouth, really.  People who specialized in living shouldn't get dead before their friends.  People who shot through the world like bullets shouldn't lose touch with it.

Inconsiderate of Chris's reverie, Major Warren went on talking.  "Tell you the truth, I half wonder if their asses didn't split right as I died on account of not wanting to keep me company.  I mean, you're the only one I can seem to lay hands on and that feels like a fucking fluke, 'cause if it were just about unfinished business I think it'd be him that let me bleed to death, not you.  Much as I hate to admit it, at this exact moment, Chris Mannix, what I'd call my primary quarrel's not exactly with you.  So  if it's not unfinished business that lets a man lurk, I could say that everybody lingers, except then where's Minnie?  Where's Sweet Dave?"

The thing was, Chris didn't half-mind listening to him.  Major Warren's mind was as sharp as his knife and anyway Chris had been raised to value two good ears even above his mouth, though he surely was fond of the latter.  He'd done a hell of a lot of listening in his life, but he was a little less used to hearing a man  _think_.  When you listened to how the teeth of one gear fed into another like that, how Major Warren's conclusions all followed neatly one from the other, it maybe lit up a little that there were things you'd given your time to hearing that didn't have the same kind of logic to them.  He congratulated himself on his largeness of spirit.  He wasn't sharing that thought with Major Warren, though, because he had the hunch Major Warren didn't give a damn what Chris had realized or not realized.  To him that penny wouldn't spend, was just more worthless Confederate money.

He must have had some kind of credit, though.  No reason for Major Warren to have gotten him off otherwise.

"So I don't know," Major Warren said, wrapping up all his wondering and sounding pissed about it.  "And that's the long and short of it."

"Well, it's a good line of thinking."

"I'd like it more if it were productive."

Chris nodded and stood, his teeth clicking together as he moved his plate over to the sink.  When he turned around, Major Warren was up close to him.

"How's your leg?"

"Thought you said you didn't give a shit."

"Pretend a minute I do."

After what had gone between them the night before, there didn't seem like much point in modesty, so Chris unbuttoned his trousers and slid them down until he could get a look at the angrily red line of stitches.  "It hurts," he said, "and the outlook ain't exactly what I'd call rosy."  As he said it, he found he wasn't as upset by it as he'd thought he was earlier.  Under Major Warren's cool gaze, his shot-up leg with its snake-lines of color spreading out from it just seemed like one more inconvenient detail the two of them had to deal with.  One that was most likely going in the same direction every other detail shared between them had gone, straight to the unquiet grave.  He skimmed his finger around the wound in a wide circle, mapping out how far the pain went.  "I was thinking I might lose the leg, but that'll only be much of a worry if that storm cuts out today, don't you think?  If I can't ride out today or maybe tonight, I don't think anybody's gonna take this off me.  Wouldn't be too much of a point to it at that stage."  He looked out the window.  It was nothing but latticed squares of white.  "And I don't see an end to that snow."

"Maybe you're no weathervane either."

"Maybe not."  He scowled.  "And maybe I'd be in better fucking shape if you hadn't knocked me down on my knees the other night."

"Well, that's my everlasting sorrow, Chris," Major Warren said, and he didn't even bother to make it a lie that Chris wouldn't see through, if you could even call pure and simple sarcasm a lie.  In this case he thought he could, because Major Warren was laying it on so thick that it meant that wasn't half of what he was really thinking.  The asshole couldn't even laugh at you without making you feel like you were missing what was funny.  Even Chester Charles Smithers, Chris bet, hadn't gotten it: down on his knees in the snow listening to Major Warren's hearty laugh, not knowing that there was a whole fucking history lesson behind it, not knowing that the meanness he was liking so much was more wrinkled-up and complicated than dumbass Smithers could guess.

"Shit," Chris said, resigning himself.  "We might as well do it again, don't you think?  I don't want to croak still wanting to get laid and I don't know that I'm gonna be up for it for that much longer."

"You have a good line of sweet-talk," Major Warren said.

"No, but I bet you did.  I bet there ain't a black woman between here and Sarasota who hasn't laid down for you, you wanted her to.  Or a white man, for that matter."

"That make you feel better, Mannix?  Thinking that all I have to do is snap my fingers and just anybody would come?  Nothing at all to do with _you_."  He drew one cold finger across Chris's throat and then closed his hand on it, squeezing just enough to make Chris's breath come thin and needy.  "You'd want me even if I didn't want a single damn thing to do with you.  You'd be riled up for a taste and not even know what you wanted on your tongue, isn't that right?"

Chris closed his eyes.  It was an easier thing to admit when he didn't have to look at Major Warren's smile at hearing it.  "Maybe, yeah."

Major Warren let him go.  "Maybe yeah is right.  Go get in the bed."

Chris could only think of one reason he was getting asked for _that_ , and it wasn't one he had any business liking, but he went anyway, dragging his leg with him like a load he was already sick of carrying.  He lay down.  Being stretched out like that had made him all swimmy-headed again, red flashes of pain darting back and forth in front of his eyes like people passing in a crowd.  Behind all of that was Major Warren, looking dangerously thoughtful.

Major Warren said, "I call this fulfilling a promise to myself, for the record.  It's a hard, late lesson to learn to not swear you won't do something over your own dead body, because evidently the dead body doesn't necessarily break the deal.  And you are something to do, for better or worse.  I don't know if I ought to be horrified or laughing my fucking head off."  He laid his hands on Chris's hipbones, still bare under the folded-down and pushed-aside fly of his pants, and before Chris could think much about it one way or the other aside from thinking it felt _good_ , Major Warren had shoved his trousers down the rest of the way and bent over him.

The inside of Chris's head went as blindingly white as the storm, like this was the real trap he had fallen into.  It was the best and least relaxing blowjob he'd ever had in his whole life.  The best not because Major Warren was especially good at it--he wasn't, which wasn't surprising considering he didn't seem like the kind to have gone around accumulating all sorts of practice--but because the knowledge that it was happening at all seemed to turn Chris inside-out with pleasure and something more than pleasure.  It didn't make it worse at all that he got now what Major Warren had been saying about it being mostly a joke, like over his dead body would he ever suck a white man's cock, it made it somehow better.  He didn't know what it made him to like not only a man's mouth on him but a _black_ man's mouth on him and he knew even less what it made him to like best of all that none of it was really _for_ him, or at least nine-tenths of it wasn't.  All of which he couldn't think about but could only live through, his fingers desperately gripping the sheets, his leg forgotten.

What he _could_ seem to think about was he wouldn't be at all surprised if it was his cock he lost from all this and not his leg, because there was no way, if he had possession of all his faculties, he would think this wouldn't end with Major Warren biting it clean off him.  Hence him not finding the experience especially soothing.

Good thing, then, that he didn't go to bed with Major Warren, living or dead, fucking or dying, to feel peaceful.

In the name of saving his prick, though, he said, "Fuck, I'm gonna--"

Evidently Major Warren hadn't had any bets with himself about swallowing spunk over his dead body, because he lifted up like a shot and finished bringing Chris off with his hand, which took no time at all.

Chris, who felt like his bones had all melted, said, "For that, major, you go on and do whatever you want with me before I'm dead and gone."

"Over your living body," Major Warren said, with a little smile that promised Chris didn't know the half of what he was offering up.

* * *

 

His leg hurt some even after he was dead, even after Major Warren had given him a hand up out of what was on the bed that Chris didn’t even want to turn and _look_ at, dammit.  He didn’t want to see himself sprawled out there.  He could feel, just a little, hot blood against the inside of his pants, the fabric heavy with it, and then he closed his eyes and the feeling, and what was left of the pain, went away.  Then he didn’t feel anything at all and it terrified him.

He reached out and grabbed Major Warren’s hand again and ran his thumb over the calluses on his palm, the living warmth of his fingers.  He didn’t let go until he was satisfied.

Chris said, “Look what you’ve gone and done to me.”  He didn’t know which way he meant it.  "I bet it's on you that I'm stuck here.  It ever occur to you that we're gonna be haunting the same fucking house?"

Major Warren just looked him over, like Chris was yet another joke, one he was just maybe starting to see the funny part of, if he squinted.  It got into Chris’s blood, sharp and hot as a surgeon’s knife and just as ruthless.  Whatever it wanted from him wasn’t anything he wanted to give.  Unless, right down at the bone where it cut him to, he did want to.  Like he’d bled out so much onto the floors of Minnie’s that something else had had room to grow inside him.  Something dangerous, even, like he really was, dead or alive, something for folks to run away from.

Not Major Warren, though.  So there was that, anyhow.

"Yeah," Major Warren said.  "I think anything you can think of, I'm in a way to think of two days before."  He didn't say it any particular way, didn't say it like he cared how Chris took it, which made Chris think that maybe, just maybe, he was telling the truth.

“And?”

“And _what_?”  Now he sounded like he cared, but not in a good way; he sounded like he’d gotten his teeth in a lemon.  He saw the encouraged look on Chris’s face—Chris could feel it on himself, jewel-bright like light shining through a windowpane—and shook his head.  “You’re a hopeless fucking case, white boy.  You’d go around wagging your tail if you had one.”

He didn’t pay that any mind.  He’d gotten what he wanted.  A hell of a gesture, admitting he liked that Chris had died, but then again it wasn’t like he could have brought Chris flowers; wasn’t like Chris would have taken them if he had.  No, this was it for them.  All they had given or gotten each other was spilled blood—his own had gone from his trousers but Major Warren's had not, he could feel, disappeared from his shoulder where Major Warren had touched him when they were busy dying together until they'd had to die separately.  It felt like enough.

That and the absence of any fucking Domergues.  He said as much--as much as that last little bit, anyway--to Major Warren.

“Might be it’s that unstrained quality of mercy of yours that’s keeping you here.”

“No,” Chris said honestly.  “That’s just you, major.  You know that.”

Major Warren put his hand on the back of Chris’s neck, pushed his fingers just slightly into Chris’s hair.  That part was funnily gentle, but the major’s thumb against his jawbone wasn’t.  There he pressed hard enough that a bruise would surely come.  A bruise like an inkblot, like Chris was one more pretty little story he was going to spin.  But the look on the Major Warren's face didn’t say that at all.  Whatever the hell this was, it too was true.


End file.
